Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day: mutual

Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day concerns the word mutual :

It’s possible to refer to a couple’s mutual devotion, but not their mutual devotion to their children. The reason is that whatever is “mutual” is reciprocal — it’s directed by each toward the other. E.g.: “So consider the matter a quid pro quo, a mutual exchange of affection between Zereoue and Mountaineer fandom.” Michael Dobie, “More-Famous Amos,” Newsday (N.Y.), 14 Nov. 1997, at A103.

But when the sense is “shared by two or more,” then the word is “common” — not “mutual.” So “friend in common” is preferable to “mutual friend,” although the latter has stuck because of Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend (the title to which, everyone forgets, comes from a sentence said by an illiterate character).

Careful writers continue to use “friend in common.”

Today’s tip is well-timed: Elaine and I just started Our Mutual Friend.

You can subscribe to the Usage Tip of the Day at Oxford University Press.

“[F]orming and moving all day long”

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Fresca’s favorite films

Fresca at l’astronave is posting, in installments, a list of one hundred favorite films. It’s Fresca’s blog that led our household’s recent Aki Kaurismäki spree.

Why one should watch the fifty-two-minute dashcam video

I don’t know what to make of anomalies or edits in the dashcam video of Sandra Bland’s arrest. But I think I know what to make of the encounter that precedes the arrest. That encounter can be seen at the start of the fifty-two-minute dashcam video. I would suggest watching before this video disappears.

The start of the video shows the final moments of trooper Brian Encinia’s encounter with another driver, a college student. I have transcribed Encinia’s words:

“You’re gonna need to see if you can get with your dad. He can give that, uh, send you an e-mail or something, you know what I mean? Get that copy of the insurance, okay? You okay? [Laughs.] This here is a warning: there is no fine, there is no penalty, but you just need to follow the posted speed limit, okay? What year are you here at school? Sophomore? You here for summer school, or? Taking a lot of classes? Just two? Okay. Here’s a copy of the warning. There’s no fine, no penalty, okay? And there’s your driver’s license, all right? Be careful, all right?”

Consider: he has stopped a driver for speeding, a driver who turns out to have no proof of insurance. And yet Encinia is a model of tact. He’s even chatty. He lets the driver off with a warning. He repeats, no fine, no penalty — for speeding and no proof of insurance.

Why Encinia takes such a different approach in his encounter with Sandra Bland has to remain a matter for speculation. It would help to know something about that first driver. She (I think it’s a young woman) speaks three audible words — “sophomore,” “just two.” Who is she? Why did she merit such different treatment? I want to ask a simple question: was that first driver white?

The fifty-two-minute video also makes clear that Sandra Bland changed lanes for a reason. A police car was coming up behind her with increasing speed. She did what any driver in that situation would be likely to do: she got out of the way. Or tried to.

Telephone exchange names on screen

From Dick Tracy’s Dilemma (dir. John Rawlins, 1947). A killer, Steve “The Claw” Michel (Jack Lambert), has fled after starting to use a pay phone with his Captain Hook-like hook. Dick Tracy (Ralph Byrd) notices scratches, “brand-new,” on the dial. Back at the office, Tracy schools Pat Patton (Lyle Latell). A model pay phone happens to be there, as if by magic:



Tracy: “I’ll tell you what these scratches give us, Pat. What's the first thing you do when you dial a telephone number?”

Pat: “Why, I, uh, look for a nickel.”

Tracy: “Oh, no, no.”

Pat: “Oh — I dial the exchange.”

Tracy: “That's right. You dial the first two letters of the exchange.”

Tracy: “Now these scratches appear only in the first two holes.”



Pat: “I get it, Dick. The exchange the killer was dialing has got to be here.”



Tracy: “Correct. In checking a list of exchanges, you’ll find there’s only one exchange with the combination of these letters: B-A for BAnning. ”

Pat: “But what about these other two scratches?”



Tracy: “That’s even simpler. Since they appear in the first hole, the killer can only have been dialing the number 1 twice.”



Pat: “Then we know the number the killer started to dial was BAnning-1, 1-something-something .”

And Pat gets the thankless job of checking every number in town to find the something-something . As John Milton said, they also serve who only sit and check telephone numbers.

Bell Telephone’s 1955 list of Recommended Exchange Names has four names that go with 2-2 : ACademy, BAldwin, CApital, and CAstle. The Telephone EXchange Name Project has many, many more. But no BAnning.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire

[I’m surprised to see Al Bridge and Jimmy Conlin from the Preston Sturges world in this low-budget movie, though I suppose I shouldn’t be. An actor would have called it working .]

A list from BrownStudies

My list prompted BrownStudies to make a list: What we’ve been watching (and reading).

Maxwell, Melville, Cather

“Writers — narrative writers — are people who perform tricks”: William Maxwell, from “The Writer as Illusionist,” a speech given at Smith College, March 4, 1955. Maxwell then reads and comments on some opening sentences, first Wuthering Heights, then “The Open Boat.” And then,

“Call Me Ishmael . . . .” A pair of eyes looking into your eyes. A face. A voice. You have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands; who will love you in a way that is upsetting and uncomfortable.

Here is another trick: “Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those gray towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much grayer today than they were then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere . . . .”

A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in.

I found this speech by chance this past weekend, while browsing in a Library of America volume. Crazy synchronicity: Maxwell’s sequence is the sequence of things in our household’s Summer Reading Club, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick followed Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady. For the first time ever, Elaine and I are reading the same book at the same time, same number of pages a day. It’s a great pleasure. We are now finishing Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, to be followed by Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada. We use two copies so that there’s no fighting. And we have side books: Elaine, Swann’s Way ; me, A Briefer History of Time . We have started as a Vacation Reading Club but plan to keep going come fall, meeting almost every day, after lunch, on the sofa. We should probably read some William Maxwell too. (I’ve read only So Long, See You Tomorrow.)

Matt Thomas of Submitted for Your Perusal has let me know of a reference to Melville and Cather in a New York Times piece earlier this month. The Summer Reading Club must be in sync with a tiny fraction of the zeitgeist, or it with us.

Related reading
All OCA Melville and Cather posts (Pinboard)

Phrasal-adjective punctuation

[Dustin, July 21, 2015.]

+1 for the hyphen.

The punchline: “My friends and I set up text alerts.”

Related reading
Bryan Garner on phrasal adjectives (LawProse) : Graphite-grey : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Kyle Wiens, stickler?

[About the post title: I couldn’t resist turning phrasal adjective into a phrasal adjective.]

“[A] slow proposition on the market”

Willa Cather to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, February 6, 1922. Cather had been invited to lecture at the Bread Loaf School of English. She is wondering whether the school plans to cover her travel and living expenses:

A slow-selling author, who pays little attention to in-come, has to pay attention to out-go, or be in the hole at the end of the year. Now, I am NOT, with tightly compressed lips, throwing your magnificent sales in your face! I’m not a bit sore about being a slow proposition on the market; but I have to cut my plans according to my cloth in order to avoid worrying.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

Related reading
All OCA Willa Cather posts (Pinboard)

“[A]lone with the old things”

Niel Herbert likes being in the Forresters’ house:


[From Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923).]

William Tell’s Chapel (there are, in fact, three chapels associated with Tell) was a popular subject for artists: here is one engraving. The House of the Tragic Poet, as it is called, stood in Pompeii. A Getty Museum essay (with several engravings) explains: “Named after its mosaic depicting the rehearsal of a satyr play, the House of the Tragic Poet was decorated throughout with scenes from the epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey.” The Captain and Mrs. Forrester’s sitting room has “large, old-fashioned engravings” on its walls.

This passage’s emotional resonance requires, I think, no explanation.

Also from A Lost Lady
“Happy days!” : Weather